Islamic Declaration  

Somewhere around June to August 1983 Alija Izetbegović was again arrested by the communists and tried in the famous Sarajevo trial of 1983. Izetbegović was accused and condemned for his writings, and in particular for the Islamic Declaration, in which he wrote that there was a renaissance among the Muslims of the world, who were waking from their lethargy. Although this work was of a theoretical nature and based on being “for” rather than “against”, the communists sentenced Izetbegović’s thinking to fourteen years in prison. This time he spent five years and eight months behind bars.

"There can be no peace or coexistence between the Islamic faith and non-Islamic social and political institutions...the state should be an expression of religion and should support its moral concepts."

"Islamic movement must and start taking power as soon as it is morally and numerically strong enough to do so"

"The Declaration which we today present to the public is not prescribed reading, intended to demonstrate to foreigners or doubters the superiority of Islam over any particular system or school of thought.

It is intended for Muslims who know where they belong and whose hearts clearly tell them which side they stand on. For such as these, this Declaration is a call to understand the inevitable consequences of that to which their love agd allegiance bind them. "

"The special task of the Islamic order is to fight for the successful elimination of all forms of anti-upbringing. Islam forbids, and the Islamic order will take specific measures to eliminate:

- all forms of alcoholization of the people
- public and secret prostitution
- pornography of the spoken word, in pictures, on film and television
- casinos, night clubs, dance halls and all other forms of entertaininment incompatible with the moral tenets of Islam."

"The upbringing of the people, and particularly means of mass influence - the press, radio, television and film - should be in the hands of people whose Islamic moral and intellectual authority is indisputable. The media should not be allowed - as so often happens - to fall into the hands of perverted and degenerate people who then transmit the aimlessness and emptiness of their own lives to others. What are we to expect if mosque and TV transmitter aim contradictory messages at the people? "

" Habib Bourgiba - mentioned here simply as being representative of a widespread tendency - wears European clothes, speaks French at home, isolates Tunisia not only from the Islamic but also from the Arab world, restricts religious training, calls for the abolition of the Ramadan fast "as fasting reduces productivity", while he himself drinks orange juice in public in order to set a suitable example. After all this, he wonders at the passivity and lack of support :n the part of the Tunisian masses for his "learned" reforms."

"We are enslaved: at one point in 1919, no single independent Muslim country existed, a state of affairs never registered either before or after that date."

As far as the so-called progressives, westerners, modernists and whatever else they are called are concerned, they are the exemplification of real misfortune throughout the Muslim world, as they are quite numerous and influential, notably in government, education and public life. Seeing the Hajjs and conservatives as the personification of Islam, and convincing others to do likewise, the modernists raise a front against all that the idea represents. These self-styled reformers in the present-day Muslim countries may he recognized by their pride in what they should rather be ashamed of. and their shame in what they should be proud of. These are usually "daddy's sons" - schooled in Europe, from which they return with a deep sense of their own inferiority towards the wealthy West and a personal superiority over the poverty-stricken and backward surroundings from which they spring. Lacking an Islamic upbringing and or any spiritual or moral links with the people, they quickly lose their elementary criteria and imagine that by destroying local ideas, customs and convictions, while introducing alien ones, they will build America - for which they have an exaggerated admiration overnight on their home soil. Instead of standards, they introduce the cult of a standard; instead of developing the potential of their own world, they develop desires, thus opening the way to corruption, primitivism and moral chaos. They cannot see that the power of the Western world does not lie in how it lives, but in how it works; that its strength is not in fashion, godlessness, night clubs, a younger generation out of control, but in the extraordinary diligence, persistence, knowledge and responsibility of its people.